Heat sinks are often used to cool electronic components of a computer system, the heat sinks being brought into the best possible thermal contact with the electronic components, for example, plug-in cards. Such heat sinks are generally characterized by a large surface and dissipate heat to the surrounding air via convection.
Modern plug-in cards such as what are known as “high-end computing cards”, are characterized by powerful processor units, generally graphics processors with thousands of computing units. Particularly, CPU-intensive parts of software applications are outsourced to these plug-in cards for quicker processing to relieve the load of a central processor. High-end computing cards are intended for use in 1 U or 2 U server rack systems. These server rack systems have special cooling systems which dissipate the high heat loss of the high-end computing cards resulting from high computing power. However, particularly due to the fact that such plug-in cards nowadays are only offered with passive cooling, the high-end computing cards are not suitable or are only suitable to a limited extent for use in a desktop or tower system. We found in practice that a flow of cool air of a conventional desktop or tower system is not sufficient to adequately cool high-end computing cards and, therefore, the cards are overheated. As a result, this may lead to a malfunction or a complete failure of the high-end computing cards.